I'm a writer, journalist, and the editor of The Gambit, the alt-weekly newspaper in New Orleans.

Journalism: My work has appeared in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Globe & Mail (Canada), The Times- Picayune (New Orleans), The Oregonian, and Willamette Week, as well as in magazines including Details, Vogue, Publishers Weekly, and Portland Monthly.

Publishing:Tight Shot, my first novel, was nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America. Its sequel, Hot Shot, was roundly ignored by everyone, but was a far better book. I'm also a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

Stage: I was a member of the Groundlings and Circle Repertory West in Los Angeles, and am a playwright (see "Stage" in the right-hand rail).

October 2007

October 31, 2007

The Magazine Publishers of America and the American Society of Magazine Editors have announced the winners of their annual Best Covers competition at their annual conference.

Some great graphic design, nice photography, and plenty of attention to this year's most popular topics and people (George Clooney, Stephen Colbert). This one, from Texas Monthly, won for Best Cover Line. See them all here.

Marc Cooper responded -- politely but forcefully -- to my comments about OffTheBus yesterday. His whole response is worth reading (and I encourage you to do so), but this is his salient point:

Your criticism, by implication, discounts any and all notions of
citizen journalism. If a precondition for being published is that you
must be paid, and therefore meet a whole series of professional
standards, then you close the door on all of the democratic
opportunities offered by the Web.

He also says that contributors to OffTheBus are a varied bunch:

The overwhelming majority of our contributors were previously
unpublished and untested. Most of them are NOT correspondents or
reporters but, instead, have decided to invest an hour or two a week in
our distributive research projects i.e. attending an event and filling
out a data form and adding some personal observations. These
contributors perform their work enthusiastically and have expressed a
great satisfaction in being able to participate in such a collective
effort.

Some of our individual reporters are, in fact, well-paid journalists
who have ASKED us for the chance to publish work their employers are no
interested in. Other correspondents of ours are fully employed
otherwise and are, in fact, delighted to be able to moonlight as
citizen reporters and see their work read by thousands of Huffington
Post readers.

Other contributors are previously existing citizen
blogger-journalists working for free for themselves -- exactly-- as you
do and we have merely reached agreements with them to re-purpose their
material and help build traffic for their own sites.

Yet others among our contributors are newbies and are quite happy to
exchange their work for the professional assistance and support offered
by our quite modestly paid staff. The pieces we publish are often
edited, reworked and improved by our professional staff.

I emailed Cooper with some questions after reading this, and he answered them directly, with the proviso that I not quote him directly, nor characterize him as a spokesman for the Huffington Post. Fair enough.

Cooper says that OffTheBus is a "non-profit" -- a detail not mentioned in The New York Times story that got my attention in the first place. (Indeed, OffTheBus -- while published on The Huffington Post website -- does not carry banner ads or other advertising, as does the Post itself. Otherwise, it looks just like any other sub-page of the HuffPost. That, I think, is a problem.)

But Cooper, in his email, says that not only will the site not accept ads: in fact, doing so would violate both its spirit and the law. OffTheBus has been funded by private donations, and will have no ad sales staff (though it does have one ad that's somehow built into the framework of the entire HuffPost site and can't be removed--see how this gets sticky?).

The Huffington Post, of course, is an online political magazine, and a spectacularly influential one. It has a paid reporting and editing staff, along with unpaid opinion contributors (many of whom are celebrities), and the site does sell ads. OffTheBus, Cooper stresses, is a much more shoestring and diffuse operation, with a variety of unpaid contributors with a variety of levels of experience, being edited by a much smaller staff.

With OffTheBus, Cooper draws the analogy of community theater: talented amateurs, "performing" for no money, in exchange for exposure, training, and the chance to get actual remunerative work.

I see it, and I don't see it; journalism in the Internet age is morphing so fast that it's hard to keep up with its ever-changing ethics. And if unpaid freelancers are being supervised by anyone, I'm glad it's by a journalist like Marc Cooper, whose work and bona fides are unassailable; I'd be happy to be edited by him. (Or by his "professional staff.") And I'm reassured that Cooper has thought these things out, that he understands the pitfalls involved and is sensitive to them. In the hands of a less scrupulous editor or company, this model could be sheer exploitation, depending on a constant supply of fresh young talent as the veterans get discouraged and give up.

But still...the "Work For Free!" journalism paradigm doesn't sit well with me. There's an unpriceable thrill for a young writer when that person realizes that the words he or she sweated over has some monetary value, that writing is a talent and a craft, a commodity as valuable as any other job.

Is that romantic? Probably. But I think Cooper agrees, at least in part. As he said in the comments to my original post:

I don't know about you, but in my case (back around 1970) I was paid
$20 and sometimes less for the first pieces I published. I remember the
first time I got paid $100 and thought I was going to pass out from
excitement. And this was for for-profit outlets (OffTheBus.net is a
NON-PROFIT). My writing wasn't worth much more at the time, but
certainly had a value greater than twenty bucks. As my writing and
confidence improved, I was able to raise my rates and move up the
market ladder.

I know the feeling. But I just want to make sure that the "citizen journalist" movement is helping new writers move up the ladder...not yanking it out from under them.

They both want to tackle imaginative, under-reported stories with their
armies of citizen correspondents. They have been aided by low start-up
costs: $150,000 for Off The Bus, and less than $20,000 for Scoop’s
first months of operation. Both rely on free labor.

I guess we're settling on "citizen correspondents" and "citizen journalists" as the acceptable synonyms for "unpaid freelancers." It's a clever bit of Newspeak, with its implication that paid correspondents and journalists are...I don't know what. Non-citizens? Bad citizens?

Well, at least some people are being paid. The site's owners, for one. Marc Cooper, for two:

“In two days, we can have 50 or 100 people work an hour a day and do
the work it used to take a reporter two months to do,” said Marc
Cooper, 56, who is OTB’s editorial director and teaches journalism at
the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School.

Ms. Huffington said that the biggest lesson she has learned so far
is that “a lot of citizen journalists need journalistic guidance.” To
address this, she hired Mr. Cooper six weeks ago to set editorial
standards and maintain them.

“This is not done by some kind of
voodoo, where you throw it out to the mass and it comes back in perfect
shape,” Mr. Cooper said. “We use traditional newsroom protocol, with
research, fact-checking and reporting. It’s just being done with a
larger pyramid base of participation.”

Back in the hoary old days, "traditional newsroom protocol" included a paycheck.

I checked out Mr. Cooper's vast personal/professional website, and noticed his bio included this:

My reporting
for The Nation has ranged from investigating river boat gambling, to
exposing exploitation of immigrant labor in the meat-packing industry,
to covering globalization and labor...My daughter, Natasha Vargas-Cooper, is the greatest source of pride and
satisfaction in my life. She’s a fearsome health care organizer for the
Service Employees International Union Local 250 and she gives me hope that that there might, indeed, be a bright future for all.

Marc Cooper's daughter sounds like a bright woman. Wonder if he'd be so proud of her if she tried to organize a labor union among her old man's new cadre of unpaid "citizen journalists"?

October 29, 2007

The Oregonian's "Write For Free!" initiative continues apace; this morning's Editor's Note congratulates all its readers who auditioned for its pages, and were given the opportunity to become unpaid freelancers"Oregonian community writers":

Five weeks ago, we invited you to nominate yourself if you wanted to come aboard as one of a dozen community writers who would contribute regularly to The Oregonian's pages and our Opinion blog.

So many of you responded with the requisite resume and three writing samples that it took us until now to finish going through the more than 250 submissions.

You're an impressive bunch. Earnest, engaged and often witty.

We easily could have selected two dozen -- or even three dozen -- of you, but now we've settled on 12 who've agreed to serve as Community Writers.

We'll introduce them to you on Sunday, Nov. 4, in print and online. We're excited about launching this new initiative aimed at expanding the civic conversation among members of our community.

I'm still fascinated by the cojones it takes to turn your customers into your employees, all under the guise of "civic conversation."

When a newspaper asks you to put your four bits in the sidewalk machine, it isn't selling the paper on which it's printed, or the ink on its pages. It's selling information and thought. It's selling writing.

So why would any paper feel it's acceptable to pay for newsprint and ink, but not writers?

October 26, 2007

I wanted to read the review of Amy Winehouse's latest concert/debacle in Zurich, but it was in the newspaper Tages Anzeiger, which doesn't have an English translation. So I ran the page through the Babelfish translator engine.

What I got sounded more entertaining than the concert itself...and more drugged-up than Amy herself:

Both happens rarely: That a concert is so terrible
that one would not have experienced it rather, and the fact that an
individual concert moment is so large that one stands there
shock-frozen before chicken skin and then dearest would like to
loose-howl.

Amy Winehouse, 24-jaehriges R'n'B wreck genius from
England, offered yesterday in the community center actually both.
Of first much and ever more, of the latter a little. Oh
Amy. however one saw it coming, and actually their bare presence was
in Zurich already a miracle: Their present tour is again and
again interrupted and by drug collapses, prison stays or
gerichtstermine of their man, from everywhere is to be heard that it
can to Amy very badly and that it condemned still times no more is not
to say to "NO, NO, NO" to the "Rehab"...

And then it stands thus there, the small person
with the large hair-style, stands there in a long white Strickpulli,
pulls around, trembles, always wipes themselves with the handruecken
over the nose, drinks, drinks, drinks, it looks abwechslungsweise like
wine and Gin Tonic, cries that you run the make-up over the face,
scratches themselves continuously, yawns, sits down on the stage,
schmeisst the microphone, runs away again and again. From their
rotated eyes under the famous black bars we see usually only the
white. Humans torment themselves. Behind it their name
stands on a midnight-blue frill curtain written in large kind Deco
type characters. So that the girl still knows at least his name.

And humans sing. So beautifully that it can be
already nearly no more humans. The voice, this powerful,
unusually black Soulstimme, seems to be the only organ in the system
Amy Winehouse, on which still relying is. An organ with an
independent existence. Drum around a living corpse. The
first numbers are fantastisch, their live-interpretation of the by
program "bake tons of Black" an illuminating: The spacious
nostalgia Orchestrierung is reduced to a rhythmic skeleton by
schlagzeug and guitar, over it raises Amy for several minutes a
vieloktavigen complaint call, far like the sky and deeply like the
sea. The chicken skin moment. Then only it flows into
facilitates swingende confidenceness of its album hit.

The translation concludes, ominously:

It strikes three
of it perfectly: sexy the Melodram "I'm NO good", "ME and Mr.
Jones" _ the radiating small Hommage to the Soul classical author "ME
and Mrs. Jones", and in the end "Rehab".

Only one tragedy.
The disturbing decay of a Idols in fifty minutes. Then
nobody wanted additions more.

October 24, 2007

I think the Los Angeles Times has some of the best photojournalists in the country. While nearly every other paper on the West Coast went with similar "firefighters silhouetted against wall of flame" shots today, the Times found a new way to tell the story:

BOOKS

Booklist:
"A worthy successor to Tight Shot, Allman's insider view of the seamier side of Hollywood is not only hip and entertaining but also has something serious to say about our insatiable hunger for tabloid thrills."

Washington Post:
"Barbed, breezy and often pretty funny...sharp and entertaining. Allman can be very funny, and Hot Shot complements nicely the less forgiving takes on Los Angeles as the future of us all. "

----------

EDGAR AWARD NOMINEE
BEST FIRST NOVEL
MYSTERY WRITERS OF AMERICA

Booklist:
"Allman turns a very sardonic pen loose on Hollywood's glitz-and-glamour crowd in this entertaining first novel... An impressive debut and an almost sure thing for a sequel."

STAGE

BOO AND THE SHREVEPORT BABY

A French Quarter convenience-store clerk has a hilariously traumatic encounter with a pair of Shreveport tourists. Part of Native Tongues 3 (Le Chat Noir, New Orleans; 2001; Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago; 2006).

A recreation of an evening at the notorious New Orleans 1950s female-impersonator nightclub My-O-My (Le Chat Noir, New Orleans; 2005).

THE LOVE GIFT

A lonely man discovers purpose when he intercepts a televangelist's letters from his neighbor's mailbox. Part of the Dramarama New Plays Festival (Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; 2004).

BABYDADDY

A black father discovers that no good deed goes unpunished when he helps his white neighbor bail her son out of Orleans Parish Prison. (Le Chat Noir, New Orleans; 2004; Walker Percy Southern Playwrights Festival, Covington; 2007).

TWO IN THE BUSH

An evening of comedies. In The Stud Mule, the world's richest woman arranges to be impregnated by a doltish escort; in Snatching Victory, an earnest college student runs afoul of her lecherous professor and the dour head of a women's-studies department (Le Chat Noir, New Orleans; 2003).

NEW ORLEANS READING

Patty Friedmann: A Little Bit RuinedOne of the first post-Katrina novels, and probably destined to be one of the best. Friedmann's sequel to Eleanor Rushing finds her crazy heroine still holding everything together after the storm (after a fashion), until she has to leave New Orleans and she falls apart physically as well as mentally. Mordantly, morbidly funny.

Tom Piazza: Why New Orleans MattersThe best post-Katrina book I've read. In 150 small pages, Piazza explicates the New Orleans experience simply and beautifully. I'll be passing this one on to anyone who wonders "But why would anyone want to live there?".